However, VOip is a cool technology, I just don't understand the use of it in a home setting? I already have my cellphone with free long distance.
Cell phones are only usable if your telephone usage style is extremely basic.
If you depend on routing calls around, intelligent decisions based on caller ID and time, etc., then you need something with a standard interface so you can connect to other equipment capable of taking your instructions and acting on them.
In a home, some of this is just hobbyist geekery, but it really does make life easier once you get it going. In a business, it's pretty much essential unless the phone is not a significant tool in the particular line of work involved.
Is it T-Mobile's fault that their corporate policy is inflexible when the channel they use in a certain area is already being used by another service?
That's a pretty dumb question, isn't it?
Is it T-Mobile's fault that their corporate policy is needlessly inflexible, resulting in their expensively-deployed service being unusable and irritating a lot of people, and gaining absolutely nothing?
I don't see a lot of other people to blame.
Forget the money; do it for the experience
on
Working Abroad?
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· Score: 2
You have your whole life to make money.
As long as you can earn enough to put a roof over your head and food on the table, go out and get that job. I mean, get the best deal you can, but don't sit around at home doing nothing (or doing something boring) because your year in Hong Kong isn't making you a millionaire.
Chances are that your time working overseas will teach you more about yourself, your world, and (perhaps surprisingly) where you come from) than anything else you'll ever do.
I've worked all over the world and there's nothing like the challenge and thrill of integrating yourself into an alien culture. You're never so alive as when everything around you is different, when everything you see demands your analysis and comprehension. It's amazing fulfilling, and anyone who denies it to themselves is crippling their future just as soon as if they'd chopped off their own leg.
Has anyone actually come across any examples of warchalking in real life? (it doesn't count if you did it yourself, or if you found out about it from a news article and went to go see it).
I walk and bike around DC more or less constantly and I've never seen one despite keeping my eyes peeled. And I know there's no shortage of WLAN networks here (netstumbled the 20-minute walk home from work and got about 40).
excessive high-midrange.. your ears are most sensitive to midrange (which is what humans use for speech) so when you get blasted with too much mid, you get ringing.. the secret to good equalized sound, is to have pounding bass (you'll never get ringing from the bass), decently loud hi's and pretty low midrange..
I know of one pub in Sydney and have heard about some more night clubs which have PC's set up playing huge MP3 play lists over and over off of MP3's on removable hard drives.
DJ at home mixes music until his removable hdd is full, then takes it to the night club, swaps hdd's, goes home and does it all again to keep the mixes fresh.
Yeah, I moonlight for one of those outfits. I don't know shit about music, but they pay me $25/hr to go to the club, stand behind a set of turntables that aren't connected to anything, fiddle with knobs, hold a headphone to the side of my head, turn my baseball cap around backwards, squint a lot, speak with a crap Manchester accent, draw fake needle tracks on my arms, and bop my head around as if I'm mixing the music. If anyone makes a request I just give them a withering look for being so uncool as to request such a tired song.
Meanwhile the real DJ is at home programming the real sets, shooting the real heroin, and earning the other $75/hr.
Its just a matter of time before the right GUI exists for DJs to do all the beat matching and mixing with mp3s. Right now most programs are geared towards simple sequential play, or maybe cross-fading
This ain't bad. No scratching, but for beat matching, etc., it does the job, as long as you've got a second sound device (USB or whatever).
a GOOD sound system will be really loud, clear, and wont leave a ringing sound in your ears the next day.
Out of curiosity - because I'd love to go out and listen to loud music and not have a ringing sound in my ears afterwards - what attribute of a good sound system is it that mitigates the ringing?
It's a different situation here, however. Your mailman is not responsible for the content of mail that travels through his name.
An ISP, which is essentially what the person with the commercial account is becoming, is responsible for their users. So if his users hack something, people will come to him looking for answers.
So I own a pizza joint and decide to put in a pay phone. I order a phone line and buy a pay phone.
A couple weeks after I install it, someone comes in, drops in 35 cents, and calls the White House, threatening to kill the President.
You think I'm going to get in trouble for that, just because the phone's in my name? (Hint: I'm not)
So if you hack thier machine and they find out and fire your friends sorry ass don't come bitching about it.
Why on earth would you think he'd "come bitching about it"? Unlike many posters here, the Starbucks employee in question displays the creativity, intelligence, and spark to want to understand how something works and how it can be changed, and therefore can be assumed to be intelligent enough to have a basic grasp on the potential consequences.
It's really sad to see all these "It's Starbucks' machine, you have no right to think about it or tinker with it" messages. More shocking still are those that claim it's "immoral" to tinker with it.
It's immoral to do something that will hurt someone.
The tinkerer receives no material advantage for tinkering, and the consequences for messing with it are pretty clear. Starbucks has a clear path of redress and we can be sure they'll take advantage of it if it suits them.
This is on par with photocopying your butt on the office copier. Is it smart? Maybe not. Is it funny or interesting? Maybe, depending on the context. Is it immoral? No.
I appreciate your myth-busting (though I still think Sealand is pretty cool). Did you have some sort of personal dispute with them at some point? You seem to know a lot about the true history of the platform.
I've never dealt with them.
I've always had a keen interest in microstates, so the story caught my eye when it first came out a few years ago. The idea of a country that existed almost exclusively to host data, free from the rules of any other sovereign body, seemed amazing, something straight out of science fiction. Out of curiosity I started digging deeper. That's when I started learning how precarious Sealand's legal position actually is, and that outside of the IT press - whose only exposure to him has been this story - Bates and son are regarded as dangerous lunatics.
I think the concept is fascinating, and I'd be intrigued to see how it works out when it actually does happen one day. But I don't think this is it - it'll collapse like a house of cards the first time they come under any pressure.
Not only is their legal position fragile at best, but their physical position is too. As I've said before in other Slashdot threads, give me five or ten thousand dollars and I have absolutely no doubt I could permanently end their enterprise - they're sitting ducks, and tremendously dependent on vulnerable supply lines. And their only recourse would be to appeal to British naval assistance, in which case their pretensions of sovereignty are effectively ended and the outcome is the same.
I am not a commando and I have no interest in actually doing anything like this, but one day there may be someone who does.
It was not "some random backwater piddling judge". Read the history [sealandgov.com].
The first time it was ruled that Sealand wasn't part of England the "King" of Sealand was accused of firing on British ships when they tried to take back Sealand. In case you didn't know, attacking Navy ships isn't exactly a small crime. Random backwater judges don't get cases like those.
Think what you will, but in actual fact the case was docketed in the local Essex court, like any other similar weapons charge resulting from actions taken in Essex would be. The same court hears burglaries, assaults, and the like.
Additionally, it was not the Navy they attacked, but lighthouse operators.
Ten years later, the King's son was kidnapped and Sealand was invaded. When he took back Sealand he also held several prisoners of war.
There is no King. There is only a delusional old man. There were no prisoners of war; there was just a kidnapping pursuant to a struggle between groups of criminals - some in possession of Sealand and some not.
When the governments of the Netherlands and Germany (where the POWs were from) asked Britain to intervene, Britain cited the previous court case stating that Sealand was a seperate nation and not under British jurisdiction.
This is flatly untrue. Do you have any evidence? (hint: Once again, citing theories from the sealandgov website is not "evidence")
Since the English legal system uses the Doctrine of Precedent (where a judges decision in a past case must be followed by other (lower) courts) and this case must have been seen in one of the highest courts in the land (probably Crown) then this is effectively a nationwide legal consensus.
I suggest you read a little more about how precedent works.
A pretrial finding of no jurisdiction is a procedural, not a substantive legal matter.
It has no more binding precedent value than if the judge had thrown the crown's case out due to the prosecutor showing up in a thong bikini.
I bet everyone here has read the book Cryptonomicon. There's a project of setting up a data haven in Philipines in that book
Actually, the data haven was in a thinly-disguised Brunei Darussalam. The stuff about the gold in the Philippines was some sort of side plot that I never really got the point of.
I wouldn't be so sure. If you check the history of Sealand [sealandgov.com] then you see that the residents have been extremely zealous about this place, firing warning shots at anyone getting close to the tower.
Plenty of people in the rural northwest of the USA are zealous about their land, firing warning shots at anyone who approaches. It doesn't make them princes of sovereign nations; it just makes them violent and dangerous crackpots.
This included some guys who had come to repair some buoy that was floating in the vicinity (called "units of British Navy" in the official Sealand history
Actually, the buoy repair work continues on schedule, as well as dredging immediately adjacent. From time to time the British coast guard equivalent escorts the people doing this work. As soon as there is sufficiently aggressive provocation that the level of escorting required becomes too expensive, the British will be on their way to disassembling HavenCo.
The crackpots are at least smart enough to know this, which is why the potshots have stopped (now they just fire them from their web site).
Citing a web site full of self-serving assertions does not "prove" anything.
They might have a chance at being considered effectively sovereign when they are admitted into an IGO, exchange accredited diplomats with someone - even North Korea, for heaven's sake - or, say, own some land which is not already the territory of another nation (i.e., the UK).
Britain's own courts have recognized the sovereignty of Sealand.
Meaningless. The Essex Assizes finding of no jurisdiction carries no legal precedent. When another case is brought against the Sealand people, the judge who hears it will have to consider the jurisdiction question anew.
Sealand has even fought a "war," and won, after which Germany ended up sending a diplomat to Sealand to negotiate the release of one of their citizens who was being held on charges of treason (the German also carried a Sealand passport). This amounted to a defacto recognition of Sealand's sovereignty (Germany first went to the British and were told that Britain made no claim to the territory of Sealand).
What happened was that Britain chose not to get involved because they thought the whole thing was stupid, and there was no potential outcome to their involvement that wouldn't be a lot more annoying than the whole thing already was. Furthermore, by the time of this incident they had already contemplated taking action to evict Roy Bates but decided it wasn't worth the public expense. There is no evidence (save for the Bates' assertion) that the UK made any statement disavowing sovereignty.
To call an internecine gangland dispute between Bates and their shifty business associates a "war" is to make a mockery of the term.
All of this information (and more) is available on the Sealand website
I worry for someone who has such a profound confusion between "propaganda" and "information".
They advertise a 3 ms ping time to London, so latency should be quite a bit better, now. I believe somewhere I read about a sat link for backup.
If they have a 3ms ping time to London then they're using direct microwave, and they can be shut down at a moment's notice by the British authorities. Hell, I could shut them down with a compass, a telescope, and a toy balloon. Once they decide they don't like me doing that, they're going to have to accept British jurisdiction in a real hurry.
The courts of England once ruled that Sealand was out of their jurisdiction for a potential criminal case.
"The courts of England." Please. You make it sound like a concerted nationwide legal consensus. Some random piddling backwater judge decided he'd rather take the long weekend and dismissed the case as not being appropriate for the specific jurisdiction it was brought under.
That Perlin guy he fired e-mail back and forth with is really quite interesting. He's done a lot of good graphics work. Last time I saw him lecture was in 1997 at SIGGRAPH. He's done a lot of good work.
Does it please you to think he's done a lot of good work?
I also remember that we are charging Africa like 3 times the amount they should be paying for linking up with our wires. (don't know the exact number/figure/percentage so I'm sorry if I'm wrong)
What do you mean, "the amount they should be paying"?
Either there's an open market, in which case they can buy from anyone they want, or there's a restricted market, in which case the high prices are the fault of the government in question.
Slashdot Mirror
Cell phones are only usable if your telephone usage style is extremely basic.
If you depend on routing calls around, intelligent decisions based on caller ID and time, etc., then you need something with a standard interface so you can connect to other equipment capable of taking your instructions and acting on them.
In a home, some of this is just hobbyist geekery, but it really does make life easier once you get it going. In a business, it's pretty much essential unless the phone is not a significant tool in the particular line of work involved.
That's a pretty dumb question, isn't it?
I don't see a lot of other people to blame.
You have your whole life to make money.
As long as you can earn enough to put a roof over your head and food on the table, go out and get that job. I mean, get the best deal you can, but don't sit around at home doing nothing (or doing something boring) because your year in Hong Kong isn't making you a millionaire.
Chances are that your time working overseas will teach you more about yourself, your world, and (perhaps surprisingly) where you come from) than anything else you'll ever do.
I've worked all over the world and there's nothing like the challenge and thrill of integrating yourself into an alien culture. You're never so alive as when everything around you is different, when everything you see demands your analysis and comprehension. It's amazing fulfilling, and anyone who denies it to themselves is crippling their future just as soon as if they'd chopped off their own leg.
Has anyone actually come across any examples of warchalking in real life? (it doesn't count if you did it yourself, or if you found out about it from a news article and went to go see it).
I walk and bike around DC more or less constantly and I've never seen one despite keeping my eyes peeled. And I know there's no shortage of WLAN networks here (netstumbled the 20-minute walk home from work and got about 40).
Interesting, thanks.
Yeah, I moonlight for one of those outfits. I don't know shit about music, but they pay me $25/hr to go to the club, stand behind a set of turntables that aren't connected to anything, fiddle with knobs, hold a headphone to the side of my head, turn my baseball cap around backwards, squint a lot, speak with a crap Manchester accent, draw fake needle tracks on my arms, and bop my head around as if I'm mixing the music. If anyone makes a request I just give them a withering look for being so uncool as to request such a tired song.
Meanwhile the real DJ is at home programming the real sets, shooting the real heroin, and earning the other $75/hr.
Out of curiosity - because I'd love to go out and listen to loud music and not have a ringing sound in my ears afterwards - what attribute of a good sound system is it that mitigates the ringing?
Yup, half a million users and NONE of them is as smart as you.
So I own a pizza joint and decide to put in a pay phone. I order a phone line and buy a pay phone.
A couple weeks after I install it, someone comes in, drops in 35 cents, and calls the White House, threatening to kill the President.
You think I'm going to get in trouble for that, just because the phone's in my name? (Hint: I'm not)
Why on earth would you think he'd "come bitching about it"? Unlike many posters here, the Starbucks employee in question displays the creativity, intelligence, and spark to want to understand how something works and how it can be changed, and therefore can be assumed to be intelligent enough to have a basic grasp on the potential consequences.
It's really sad to see all these "It's Starbucks' machine, you have no right to think about it or tinker with it" messages. More shocking still are those that claim it's "immoral" to tinker with it.
It's immoral to do something that will hurt someone.
The tinkerer receives no material advantage for tinkering, and the consequences for messing with it are pretty clear. Starbucks has a clear path of redress and we can be sure they'll take advantage of it if it suits them.
This is on par with photocopying your butt on the office copier. Is it smart? Maybe not. Is it funny or interesting? Maybe, depending on the context. Is it immoral? No.
Particularly compelling that the image grew from 5K to 42K when "compressed" using OGG Vorbis, and then to 114K when converted back to PNG.
I've never dealt with them.
I've always had a keen interest in microstates, so the story caught my eye when it first came out a few years ago. The idea of a country that existed almost exclusively to host data, free from the rules of any other sovereign body, seemed amazing, something straight out of science fiction. Out of curiosity I started digging deeper. That's when I started learning how precarious Sealand's legal position actually is, and that outside of the IT press - whose only exposure to him has been this story - Bates and son are regarded as dangerous lunatics.
I think the concept is fascinating, and I'd be intrigued to see how it works out when it actually does happen one day. But I don't think this is it - it'll collapse like a house of cards the first time they come under any pressure.
Not only is their legal position fragile at best, but their physical position is too. As I've said before in other Slashdot threads, give me five or ten thousand dollars and I have absolutely no doubt I could permanently end their enterprise - they're sitting ducks, and tremendously dependent on vulnerable supply lines. And their only recourse would be to appeal to British naval assistance, in which case their pretensions of sovereignty are effectively ended and the outcome is the same.
I am not a commando and I have no interest in actually doing anything like this, but one day there may be someone who does.
Think what you will, but in actual fact the case was docketed in the local Essex court, like any other similar weapons charge resulting from actions taken in Essex would be. The same court hears burglaries, assaults, and the like.
Additionally, it was not the Navy they attacked, but lighthouse operators.
There is no King. There is only a delusional old man. There were no prisoners of war; there was just a kidnapping pursuant to a struggle between groups of criminals - some in possession of Sealand and some not.
This is flatly untrue. Do you have any evidence? (hint: Once again, citing theories from the sealandgov website is not "evidence")
I suggest you read a little more about how precedent works.
A pretrial finding of no jurisdiction is a procedural, not a substantive legal matter.
It has no more binding precedent value than if the judge had thrown the crown's case out due to the prosecutor showing up in a thong bikini.
Actually, the data haven was in a thinly-disguised Brunei Darussalam. The stuff about the gold in the Philippines was some sort of side plot that I never really got the point of.
It is within their universally-recognized territorial waters.
Everyone who has a problem with Sealand comes to the UK government first (such as when the US followed a pirate radio operator there).
Plenty of people in the rural northwest of the USA are zealous about their land, firing warning shots at anyone who approaches. It doesn't make them princes of sovereign nations; it just makes them violent and dangerous crackpots.
Actually, the buoy repair work continues on schedule, as well as dredging immediately adjacent. From time to time the British coast guard equivalent escorts the people doing this work. As soon as there is sufficiently aggressive provocation that the level of escorting required becomes too expensive, the British will be on their way to disassembling HavenCo.
The crackpots are at least smart enough to know this, which is why the potshots have stopped (now they just fire them from their web site).
Sealand is about a sovereign as the Hutt River Province (i.e., not at all).
Citing a web site full of self-serving assertions does not "prove" anything.
They might have a chance at being considered effectively sovereign when they are admitted into an IGO, exchange accredited diplomats with someone - even North Korea, for heaven's sake - or, say, own some land which is not already the territory of another nation (i.e., the UK).
Meaningless. The Essex Assizes finding of no jurisdiction carries no legal precedent. When another case is brought against the Sealand people, the judge who hears it will have to consider the jurisdiction question anew.
What happened was that Britain chose not to get involved because they thought the whole thing was stupid, and there was no potential outcome to their involvement that wouldn't be a lot more annoying than the whole thing already was. Furthermore, by the time of this incident they had already contemplated taking action to evict Roy Bates but decided it wasn't worth the public expense. There is no evidence (save for the Bates' assertion) that the UK made any statement disavowing sovereignty.
To call an internecine gangland dispute between Bates and their shifty business associates a "war" is to make a mockery of the term.
I worry for someone who has such a profound confusion between "propaganda" and "information".
For the ISO to assign you a TLD, you have to be a real country, or at least a colony with the potential for eventual independence.
Sealand doesn't have a TLD for the same reason that I'm not assigned a TLD every time I go swimming on the New Jersey shore.
If they have a 3ms ping time to London then they're using direct microwave, and they can be shut down at a moment's notice by the British authorities. Hell, I could shut them down with a compass, a telescope, and a toy balloon. Once they decide they don't like me doing that, they're going to have to accept British jurisdiction in a real hurry.
"The courts of England." Please. You make it sound like a concerted nationwide legal consensus. Some random piddling backwater judge decided he'd rather take the long weekend and dismissed the case as not being appropriate for the specific jurisdiction it was brought under.
Does it please you to think he's done a lot of good work?
You ain't foolin' me, Alice.
What do you mean, "the amount they should be paying"?
Either there's an open market, in which case they can buy from anyone they want, or there's a restricted market, in which case the high prices are the fault of the government in question.
Actually, Worldcom didn't go out of business at all. They're just in trouble.